Imagine this: You’re selected to serve on a jury involving the homicide of an American military veteran and police officer. You’re a patriot. You admire our troops. You believe in law and order.  But the state in which you live and the county in which you live fails in this instance to maintain law and order. An off-duty cop is shot to death, and the prosecution claims it was all over a neighborhood dispute about some cats.

• Sidebar: It’s difficult to find details of this case other than the appellate court’s decision and CNN’s In Session blog. I have inferred that the “victim,” Robert Odam, was a military veteran from a photograph of him in uniform, which I saw on TV. However, the uniform might be a law enforcement uniform. The incident occurred in 2004, which led me to think Mr. Odam might have been an Iraq War veteran, and as a result the jury might have been biased strongly in his favor.

That’s the situation that confronted two juries in South Carolina v Rye. Every criminal jury is convened at the end of a series of systemic failures to maintain law and order. In this case, the failures were monumental. That’s why it’s “really hard to be a juror.”

In the first Rye trial, the jury wasn’t told that it’s legal to defend your home; in the second they were.

• Sidebar: CNN’s In Session blog called the appellate court’s overturning of the first verdict a “paperwork problem.” I’m sorry to say I find that offensive. When a judge reads the wrong law to a jury, it’s an egregious error that violates not only the defendant’s rights but also the jurors’. The error forced the jurors to find a man guilty of murder, because they swore to uphold the law as the judge explained it. To be honest, it makes me wonder about the first judge’s objectivity; how any unbiased judge could fail to see the incident as a type of home invasion is beyond me.

But in neither trial, as far as I can tell, did the prosecution admit that the supposed victim was an off-duty cop who was breaking the law or that his fellow officers repeatedly colluded with him in violating the civil rights of a citizen.

• Sidebar: Several police officers (sheriff’s deputies, I think) responded to calls from Mr. Rye, the defendant, but failed to follow up and investigate what appeared to be not only vandalism but breaking and entering and unlawful use of a gun. That was a dangerous situation. That’s what the cops are for.
• Even the 911 operators appeared (in my opinion) to respond improperly to Mr. Rye’s calls. The only explanation that I can see is that they all knew who was behind the incidents and didn’t want to get their buddy in trouble.
• I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me this is a federal civil rights violation. (I hope Mr. Rye will sue the county now for false imprisonment, and I wish the U. S. Justice Dept. would take a look at the county, too.)

Jury in the Hot Seat

I have been in a jury deliberation room and been asked to decide whether a person should go to prison for decades for a crime in which the victim was utterly sympathetic, like a veteran or police officer. When I was selected, I expected it to be an easy deliberation, but it turned out to be one of the most difficult, stressful events in my otherwise stressful life. And since then I have heard countless other jurors express the same feeling.

It was so stressful, I spent weeks and weeks afterwards researching the law, and then I decided to vent my frustration in a blog. (My venting hasn’t yet relieved me of my anxiety about the state of the justice system in this country.)

Finally, I realized that what I really needed to do was write fiction about jury duty. I’m a fiction writer, after all. So I wrote, THE JUROR HANGS.

In the novel, my protagonist is a young (much younger than me) librarian-juror who finds herself the lone holdout on a jury of 11 men plus 1. She’s a lot more self-confident than I am. She also handles the stress a lot better than I did. But partly that’s because I decided to set the trial in 1952, which was a much simpler, happier time than these.

THE JUROR HANGS is available exclusively from Amazon on the Kindle. It’s a reasonable $2.99. You can read it on the Kindle, the iPhone, or your laptop. (If you would like to read it in another format, please email me at ccm@ccmambretti.com.)

If you want to know how a juror should behave—as opposed to the way I behaved—read THE JUROR HANGS. Otherwise, I think you should thank your lucky stars that a jury in South Carolina saw through the government’s twisted scheme and freed an innocent man—the real victim in South Carolina v. Thomas Grover Rye.

 P. S. If the number of illiterate comments my previous post about this case received is any indication, there are quite a few people in South Carolina who don't understand something: if you have an issue with your neighbor's pets or the condition of the property, you are supposed to contact county authorities and demand they do something about it--issue a citation, for instance. You aren't supposed to load a gun, trespass on the property, and start shooting, whether or not you are the friend of an off-duty cop.